Africa's thriving democracies and economies, and its alarming transnational security threats, make it more important than ever to the United States. Obama, however, has largely ignored the continent. Regardless of who wins in November, Washington cannot afford to continue on the president's current path.

Debates about the possibility of containing a nuclear Iran often hinge on judgments of whether the regime there is rational. But as a wealth of recently released Iraqi documents about Saddam Hussein’s tumultuous reign in Iraq show, even an arguably rational leader can be unreasonable -- and very hard to deter.

With protests raging across the Middle East, how should Washington respond? In an essay from the September/October issue, Robert Malley and Peter Harling argue that the Obama administration must recognize that there is not a clean divide between a moderate pro-American camp and an extremist militant axis.

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has prompted much handwringing over the problems with prewar intelligence. Too little attention has been paid, however, to the flip slide of the picture: that the much-maligned UN-enforced sanctions regime actually worked. Contrary to what critics have said, we now know that containment helped destroy Saddam Hussein's war machine and his capacity to produce weapons.

Conventional wisdom holds that Bill Clinton presided over a disastrous downsizing of the U.S. military. But this claim is wrong. In fact, Clinton's Pentagon maintained high levels of readiness and enacted a bold military modernization program that bore fruit in Bosnia and Kosovo -- and in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Strobe Talbott's memoirs provide a richly detailed account of the U.S.-Russia relationship in the 1990s. They are an insider's chronicle of critical (and often overlooked) successes mixed with deeply regrettable lost chances.